I've been waiting for Microsoft to release their Data Protection Manager (DPM) product ever since seeing the beta version info in April ... see prior post
Today MS released the final product called DPM 2006 ... which isn't quite as sweet as I'd hoped. I was hoping it would do constant byte level syncronization. This final release says the max it will do is hourly snapshots...which is still way better than nightly tape backups, but not a true continous backup solution.
We're in the process of building a DPM box ... that's what the other SATA disks were for from my prior post. It's just a desktop PC, with a 4port SATA card, add 4 320GB drives in JBOD "raid", install server2003, install DPM, install DPM licenses on the boxes you want to "backup" and enjoy hourly disk-disk backups.
Users can also self recover files they may have accidentally changed or deleted ... not that it happens too often, but it's still a nice feature.
I'm still waiting word back on charity pricing ... normal pricing is $995 to cover the DPM box and backup 3 other boxes. I've already downloaded the 120-day trial so we'll give it a whirl without actually buying it until next year...assuming it's as slick as it appears.
More to follow on this project as it comes together...
I was also quite disappointed when I saw that DPM only supports “near” continuous data protection. But it also has some more limitations. Please check out my lengthy review about the about Data Protection Manager: http://cydome.com/wiki/Microsoft_Data_Protection_Manager_%28DPM%29
Posted by: Michael Pietroforte | October 02, 2005 at 05:12 AM
Jason,
You mention that with this users can restore their own files from backup.... Is this an extention of the "Previous Versions" tool already in Server 2003, or is it something completely different?
Posted by: Joshua Gregory | January 09, 2006 at 02:48 PM